Policy initiatives in the Trump administration and the Biden-Harris administration significantly accelerated the Taliban victory in Afghanistan. This podcast supports the conclusion that the major factors in this defeat were the historical difficulty in governing Afghanistan, the Afghan republic’s two inefficient and corrupt governments, an ineffective US strategy, operational shortcomings by US forces, an ineffective Afghan military, Pakistan’s duplicitous policy, and the strength and determination of the Taliban. This podcast rejects the claim that the United States nation-building effort was a major factor in its defeat and concludes with a discussion of lessons encountered.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/3/

Keywords:  Taliban, Afghanistan, US forces, Afghan military, Pakistan

Episode transcript: “Defeat in Afghanistan: An Autopsy”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

You’re listening to Decisive Point.

I’m talking with Joseph J Collins today, a retired Army Colonel and civil servant whose service has included tours in the Army and Joint Staffs, and OSD Collins is the author of defeat in Afghanistan and autopsy. And in the spring, 2023 issue of Parameters. Welcome, Joe.

Joseph J. Collins

Thanks, Stephanie. With everything going on in Ukraine and worries about Taiwan, I’m glad that we can dive back into it for a bit here today.

Host

Let’s jump right in, you noted at the beginning of your article, and I’m quoting you here, “the United States failed to accomplish its objectives, whether judged in terms of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, or nation building.

This outcome represents a significant unforced error in American National security policy.” What prices did Afghanistan and America pay In this venture?

Collins

You’re correct. I think we failed in all of our major tests in Afghanistan. We failed overall, but in each of those tasks you mentioned, we failed in varying degrees. In counterterrorism, we finally did get bin Laden, and afterward, his successor, Ayman Zawahiri. We did prevent further attacks on our nation. But we left behind in Afghanistan a significant ISIS problem, as well as, perhaps, as many as 500 al Qaeda fighters who remain closely associated with the Taliban, Pakistan, and al Qaeda’s best friend, Saraj Haqqani. A US- and UN-designated terrorist, is now the old powerful interior minister in Kabul.

In the main counterinsurgency effort, US forces held their own but never decisively defeated the Taliban. We passed the baton to the Afghanistan Army in 2014, but, in the end, they lost ground, could not succeed and, finally, sensing Western abandonment or what they thought would be Western abandonment, they quit the field and nation building. We did much great work, but we were inefficient. We fostered corruptions, and our failures there were costly in the main, though I don’t see nation building and the nation building effort as a significant source or cause of our defeat. There, we talked about costs. We paid a steep price—nearly 2,500 US deaths, 1,200 allied deaths, and over 25,000 wounded over a two-decade period. We spent $2 trillion on this effort when all things are considered. But with all of that, Afghans suffered much more—66,000 dead soldiers, airmen, and police officers (and) 50,000 civilians perished. Most of them at the hands of the Taliban, which is a horrible toll for a nation of not much more than 35 million people. As a result of our defeat, Afghans lost civil rights and personal freedom. The country’s economy is in worse shape than ever. The clock in healthcare, education, and economic opportunity has been turned back to the terrible days of the 1990s. The women of Afghanistan are essentially under house arrest. That’s a steep price for that country.

Host

How did the Bush and Obama presidencies shape the war?

Collins

This is a 20-year experience for the United States. Bush and Obama each managed the war effort for eight years. Neither was able to put together a winning effort, but neither was willing to give up altogether. Both Bush and Obama, in varying degrees, were distracted by the war in Iraq. Team Bush came in country in 2001 looking to avenge 9/11. Their initial objective was to destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan and remove the Taliban from power.

President Bush quickly added nation building to the mission, knowing that if we failed to stabilize Afghanistan, extremists would just take over again. The first few years under Bush were quiet, but Iraq took first priority, even as the Taliban regained strength. By 2008, the last year of the Bush administration, team Bush realized that the Afghanistan effort needed help, and so did team Obama.

Obama campaigned on Afghanistan as the “good” war and argued that it would be first priority. As we were beginning to leave Iraq after an agonizing set of meetings over a few months, President Obama decided to surge in Afghanistan, raising our troop strength for the second time. This time to nearly 100,000, with the Allies adding troops as well. Afghan forces were reinforced, and an army of over 300,000 cops and soldiers was in the field. It was a promising start, but President Obama was true to his word. He gradually turned off the surge, beginning at the 18th month. By the end of his term, a few years later, U.S. forces were down to about 8,400 personnel. In summary, Bush and Obama muddled through, presiding over a deteriorating battlefield situation, but at the same time keeping faith with our allies.

Host

And Trump and Biden? How did they impact the effort in Afghanistan?

Collins

In contrast to their predecessors, presidents Trump and Biden worked for a total troop withdrawal. In the end, they broke faith with our Afghan allies, demoralized Afghan forces in the field, and opened the door to the final Taliban offensive. While our failure in Afghanistan really was 20 years in the making, presidents Trump and Biden bear special responsibility for the defeat. Trump came into office as a skeptic of the war effort. But encouraged by his national security adviser, Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster and the theater Commander General Mick Nicholson, he stepped up efforts and made a modest trooper reinforcement. About a year later, he entered into direct negotiations with the Taliban without our allies at the table. In February 2020, his envoy signed the Doha Accords, promising a full US withdrawal by spring of 2021. Trump did not insist on a ceasefire or force the Taliban to come to the table with the Kabul government. Trump lowered our troop strength to 35,00 personnel. The bare minimum contractors at that time declined from nearly 10,000 to about 6,000. That’s after the Doha Accord up to the beginning of the Biden administration.

For their part, the Taliban made a series of promises, but the only one they kept was not to kill American advisers until the withdrawal was complete. Team Biden came in intent on a full withdrawal. They slid the withdrawal date to August, but they failed to read the situation. Their withdrawal plan, (was) marked by the embassy closure, the recall of our last and highly respected commander General Scott Miller, and the abandonment of our central base at Bagram Airfield. All of these things together drowned out our pledges of lasting support. For the Kabul regime, the Afghan army, who had sacrificed 66,000 dead to the war, lost the will to fight, and by the time we executed a single-point evacuation from Kabul Airport, the adjacent neighborhoods were under Taliban control. One hundred twenty thousand people, mostly Afghan, were withdrawn, but 70,000 of our allies in the special visa pool were left behind. As General Milley noted in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the withdrawal was a logistical success and a strategic failure.

Host

You note that the major factors that brought about the victory of the Taliban over Afghanistan and its partners are complex, but few. Please expand on that.

Collins

Decisive factors (in my mind), and this is certainly subject to argument—and indeed in the more than 50 things in the few books that I’ve written about Afghanistan, I’ve realized that the truth has been elusive and that perceptions matter. This is my arrangement of the decisive factors, and I hope your listeners and the readers of Parameters will come back and tell me where I went wrong and what their list is.

The first thing that I always mentioned is the difficulty of governing Afghanistan. This was not a showstopper, but it provided a very difficult context. Our leaders and modern Afghan leaders had to deal with a nation, Afghanistan, that was at war since 1978. Institutions were completely destroyed—public and private. Extreme poverty and underdevelopment was a given. Ethnic rivalries between the major groups (Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara) were a major part of Afghan history, and they continued to be a real problem for the government. There were also religious rivalries, (not only a Shia–Sunni divide, with the Sunnis being in the great majority) but there was also a difference in those who believed in the most primitive and fundamentalist aspects of Islam and those who had a more modern approach in the 20th century.

In Afghanistan, most leaders were deposed, exiled or executed in office. The only really good time of significant peace in Afghanistan was from the mid (19)30s up until 1978, which were dominated by the monarchy. But Afghanistan in 2021 was not a lost cause. Other factors carried more weight in determining our defeat. Clearly, the Karzai and Ghani governments left a lot to be desired. They seldom rose above ineffectiveness and corruption. The lack of modern institutions compounded this problem. The US also failed to develop and execute an effective strategy that you would unite all coalition efforts and chart a course to success. The Iraq effort compounded this problem. From 2003 to 2008, the time when Afghanistan and the war in Afghanistan was spiraling downward, conditions in Iraq were often much worse.

It wasn’t just a question of material resources. It was, more importantly, I think, a question of the imagination and the decision-making time of Americans, senior officers and civilian officials. Throughout all this, the United States armed forces also bears a share of the blame for how the war was fought. Our armed forces showed brilliance in logistics and tactics, but much less skill and operational and strategic planning. We never achieved unity of command and never harmonized our counterterrorist and counter insurgency efforts. We built up the Afghan army and police, but we made them in our mold. They were large, slow, bureaucratic. They were also a complete shareholder in Afghan corruption.

The Afghan Air Force was slow rolled in the beginning and it never caught up. Only Afghan commando units, advised by coalition special operators, were predictably good and reliable in the field. A major factor also can be found in Pakistani policy. They played the United States like a fiddle. They exploited their status as an ally, essential to our logistical effort, while at the same time effectively supporting and providing a safe haven for the Taliban. One finally one has to give credit to the Taliban themselves. They fought valiantly and consistently. Again, this is part of an old irregular warfare pattern. The insurgents had more motivation and constancy than the forces of the national government.

Host

What lessons learned can we carry forward?

Collins

We did a book at the National Defense University called Lessons Encountered: Learning from the Long War. It was about Afghanistan and Iraq, published in 2015. We preferred (the title) Lessons Encountered to Lessons Learned because quite often when we found that we have learned the same lessons many times before and just not absorb them. It’s always a tough question. “Lessons encountered” is a more neutral term and one full of hope that people will study examples of this war. And again, this is something that I put forward to start the discussion, certainly not as the last word. The first and foremost, and what my army buddies used to call a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious), the United States of America should avoid being a third party in an insurgency where the insurgents have safe havens and strong foreign support, particularly from adjacent nations. That was a factor in Vietnam. It was a factor here in Afghanistan. You have to deal with that foreign support, or you’re making counterinsurgency almost impossible when you have a motivated enemy, as you did here in this case. Secondly, we have to remember (that) neither Iraq nor Afghanistan began as an insurgency. We have to be careful to keep our eye on the changing character of a conflict where we’re preparing for great-power conflict. That’s the first priority. But irregular warfare may not be far away, and we have to be able to make those assessments. And to change both in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were probably slower than we might have been to adapt to counterinsurgency.

Some of our earlier commanding generals, I would remind you here that a number of people in the Pentagon were not eager at all, particularly in the beginning, to bill Afghanistan as an insurgency at all, A third lesson: long, irregular wars (even if they are small wars) by some description will be expensive. Policy inertia and some costs will tend to keep us deployed for long durations. Large land deployments will be costly. The key decision I think, and this is another lesson, is when to commit to it and how to commit to them? It’s hard to break contact once you’re in a fight, but while raiding and air strikes have their place, they seldom create lasting results. By, with, and through is a useful technique, but there will be many cases where the presence of our forces on the ground will be necessary. Finally, it’s hard to avoid nation building as part of a long-term commitment. It would be nice if we could match a troop presence with simple counterterrorist operations. That was our hope at the beginning, but while it’s an attractive notion, it’s not practical. You have to help your allies out as we found in President Bush’s terms.

Host

Care to share your final thoughts before we go?

Collins

The wiser sleuths among the readers of the Parameters article will be able, between the lines, perhaps, to see some emotional reactions. I’ve been writing on the war in Afghanistan since November 1980, and it’s the end of Afghanistan in 2021. The way it ended was clearly a significant downbeat for me. I worry about our veterans who fought so hard there. And so many like General Campbell, General Nicholson, Scott Miller. Those who had so many multiple tours—people, particularly in the special operations community—who had spent so many different tours there. I feel for them even more. I feel for the people in Afghanistan. Their immediate future is bleak.

Some good news for us, but not for the Taliban, is that the nation, the country that the Taliban conquered, is not the same one that they conquered 1996. Half the Afghan population is under 25 and did not know the old Taliban. The Taliban, of course, despite their protestations, appears to be about as dumb as they were in 1996. It’s just an amazing combination of ignorance and arrogance. They will turn around and put all of their policy issues to a religious test. There’s no system of government and no religion that tells you that life is a suicide pact, and that’s in some ways where they are.

Women are now not just forbidden to attend high school and college, but they’re also forbidden to work independently for foreign humanitarian, nongovernmental organizations. Most of them had large-scale female staff because they were dealing with infants and children and healthcare and education. And Afghan women tend to dominate there. Mixing Afghan men and women is difficult, so the NGO’s wisely turned toward the female population in Afghanistan, which is so underutilized already.

We have unrest. In some of the non-Pashtun areas of the countryside there remains, of course, huge problems with ISIS. We have to keep an eye on ISIS and al Qaeda elements that are in the country. Sadly, I think this validates Clausewitz’s observation that. The results of war are never final. Afghan is an area of such strife that the export of conflict from conditions inside of Afghanistan is likely. At the same time, the Taliban today is much better armed and supported because of their victory against the Afghan army than they’ve ever been before. And so, when you look inside your own crystal ball for the immediate future of (Afghanistan), it looks bleak. And undoubtedly, as bleak as it was in 1996 when the original Taliban leadership took over.

Host

Thanks for your insights on this topic, Joe. And I echo your desire for feedback. I’ll make sure we have an e-mail address in the show notes.

Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or on the genesis article.

Collins

Thanks for paying attention to this, Stephanie.

Host

Listeners, if you want to learn more, read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 1.

About the Author:

Joseph J. Collins is a retired Army colonel and civil servant. His 46 years of service included tours in the Army and Joint Staffs and OSD (Policy). From 2001–04, he served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations. He has taught at the United States Military Academy, the National War College, and Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. Collins holds a doctorate from Columbia University and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.